I'd decided to take a break from Redspot and have moved on to other games, but I logged on today between homework problems for some mindless killing and noticed that Sam Tupy himself is now the leader of another huge team, so I wanted to bring all of this out into the public, because everyone should know how this game is ran.
Prior to the update and even after, there was lots of discussion about certain members being removed from UKA that people didn't like. For example Luke (You'reFucked/Luccianno) was a top pick because people didn't particularly like him, as was Sito. UKA decided to hold a vote, but there was also a lot of contention at times with Nakon as team leader and some of the decisions he was making. I initially thought that we were on the right track to unifying the team and we staged a team vote to determine who should be left out of the team, but before the vote could become finalized, it was decided that the team should be dissolved through a sequence of events which I will do my best to explain below. Before I do so however, it is also worth note that during this vote Sam himself accrued three collective votes from Amine, Sito and Hamada who voted for him to be removed because they did not believe that the developer should be on the team; or at least that he should be playing as sam, as that opened us up to a lot of accusations of favoritism and cheating.
After this last big release, one of the big topics of discussion in the beta team and in UKA itself was simply how to deal with the team and make the game more fun for everyone. We all agreed on chopping tons of health off our base and spent a lot of time determining how to balance the game itself through the team; whether that included making 100% sure that nonagression pacts were followed or just splitting up. What brought about this discussion at least for me, was the destruction of Spectra's base, which included a lot of those from UKA who were beta members, and most notably (although it never had a chance to be deployed) included two people with mini guns. This event took place less than a day after the release of the game. This was problematic for me and many others simply because we as a team were using our knowledge as beta members to destroy another team, when information on how to get the minigun was not known to anyone else at the time, and it was our resources that allowed us to have this gun in the first place. A lot of us agreed on cutting the base health down to 50 million, which would be around where the addition of mettle and would started to diminish in the amount of health it would add to the base, and would have resulted in us losing a net of about 136 million hp all told. The second issue however was what to do with all of the items inside the base, as now that item grabbers were much less effective, we basically had a ton of items that noone could get. Lots of ideas were eventually proposed, but none really surfaced as a great solution.
During this discussion, multiple STW admins got on teamtalk with a few of the UKA members, and we hashed out some of the issues that were apparent and collectively decided on a few things. first, sam came to the revelation that he's not much of a gamer and more of a developer, and realized that having all his friends as beta members on the most powerful team in the game was detremental to the progress of the game. Here, I am not sure why this was an issue because we're essentially losing things for being acquainted with Sam, but we'll move beyond that. This discussion resulted in a few points being raised:
* Many of the people on UKA were admins, if not all. This is simply because we were friendly with Sam and thus were around and could make sure that people weren't cheating.
* Many (save maybe one member) of the beta members were on UKA. The only exception I can think of to this is JimmyDub.
* UKA's size (16 at the time, if I remember correctly) was quite literally more than 50% of the player base, and thus it was hard for others to build up.
Given these points, we decided that ultimately it would make sense if a few things were to occur:
* The UKA base would be destroyed, as we weren't able to come to any other consensus on how to best manage the base and the items inside. This would allow us to give a better prospective on what it's like and help sam better direct the game.
* The team cap would be limited to 5, to prevent huge teams like UKA from growing again.
After the UKA base destruction was to take place, we had a team member (Luke) who was magically and randomly kicked from the team. No one understands who did it or why, but this essentially solved the problem of what to do with the resources. Sam then decided that he couldn't wait for the team and bases to be destroyed, because in his words "the team was ripping itself apart from the inside" and decided to stage a huge show of blowing it up, which caused tons and tons of lag for the server while he detonated massive amounts of sat bombs while receiveing lavish praise from the player base about how cool it was that UKA was going down and thanking him for doing that.
Interestingly enough, none of the points we agreed on have occured. Part of the reason for destroying the team was that we had beta members, admins, and a developer all on board as well as a huge member limit. This hasn't stopped Sam from recruiting a couple more people and building yet another huge team, consisting interestingly enough with beta members, admins and developers. Also worth note is that the team cap of 5 never was implemented, and so UKA rises again; this time under the control of Sam with only people he likes in it. I'll let you folks be the final decision on whether or not Sam wants to grow the game, or whether this destruction and rebuilding was nothing but a power play staged to create the team that he wanted and seed full control to him. While the argument could be made that the team could be destroyed, there's something to be said for the fact that they currently have 2600 kills, which is disproportionate to any other team in the game.